To Search or Sort: Place the cursor over a column heading and click on the arrow You can then sort in Ascending or Descending order or click on a particular value to select the cases in that category.

The column labeled "Tags" allows you to sort and search cases by each of several additional common characteristics. To see the definitions of these terms, click on their full names: ​

​The six columns on the far right of this page display separately the Contributing Factors that are listed together on the Summary Page. To save space, we use abbreviations. To see definitions of these factors, click on their full names:

The Filter finds cases that contain any of the words you enter if you check Or, or all of them if you check And. It is not a search that works with quotation marks. It does work with truncation, but not with truncation symbols such as * and !. It scans the Detailed and Summary Views, and the narrative summaries.

Note: An asterisk (*) in the column to the right of the "DNA" column means that the case is not included in the Innocence Project's list of DNA exonerations because post-conviction DNA evidence was not central to establishing innocence, and other non-DNA factors were essential to the exoneration.

About the Registry

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. The Registry also maintains a more limited database of known exonerations prior to 1989.

Contact Us

We welcome new information from any source about exonerations already on our list and about cases not in the Registry that might be exonerations.